Living-history museums dare not drive away those they hope to educate by revealing too much of the bitter truth. But neither site can begin to recreate the stench, the terror, the misery that haunted every place and everybody in that bloody era. Today’s images of the seventeenth century-up the road from Williamsburg at Historic Jamestowne or down the road from Harvard at Plimouth Plantation-aren’t so well scrubbed. And almost anywhere in British North America during that century was a paradise compared to what had existed a hundred years earlier. The well-scrubbed Williamsburg, Virginia, that tourists see today would have been unrecognizable to Thomas Jefferson, much less to the enslaved laborers who made up most of its population in the eighteenth century. Colonial history, I’ve often told my students, isn’t pretty.
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